Only
officers and gentleman are listed here currently (details of
ordinary seamen are much more difficult to come by for this era) each ship had a
full compliment of 70-80 men

Jules Sebastian César Dumont D'Urville

In
1836 Emperor Louis Philippe of France wanted France to play a part in the
exploration of the Southern Seas.

As he saw it an imbalance had arisen, though
it was 60 years since the British ship Endeavour under Captain Cook
had entered the ice and though British and American whalers and sealers, had
been in Southern waters for over 50 years, France had yet to play any active
role. Dumont d'Urville in Astrolabe would lead and would be
accompanied by another ship La Zéléé captained by Charles Hector
Jacquinot. Seven scientists accompanied the crews on the voyage.

Captain Jules Sébastien-César Dumont
d'Urville was fifty years old and crippled by gout, as he went aboard the
Astrolabe
he overheard one of his men wondering if he would actually survive the
voyage. He was promised a reward by the king for each degree passed beyond
67° south and "whatever you choose to ask for" if he reached the South Pole.

The ships left Toulon on September the 7th
1837, the aim to locate the southern magnetic pole.

On January the 22nd 1838 the ships came
across Antarctic ice in the Antarctic peninsula region, d'Urville described
it:

"...a marvelous
spectacle. More severe and grandiose than can be expressed, even as it
lifted the imagination, it filled the heart with a feeling of
involuntary terror; nowhere else is one so sharply convinced of one's
impotence. The image of a new world unfolds before us, but it is an
inert, lugubrious, and silent world in which everything threatens the
destruction of one's faculties"

They were unable to make much progress as
their ships were sail only, they sighted the previously named Palmer
Peninsula and then sailed for Chile. Scurvy affected the crew and two men
died while 22 others deserted the ships or were too ill to carry on.

They sailed across the pacific in more
temperate and tropical climes before heading south again to Tasmania
arriving in November 1839. They set sail for Antarctica once again on the
first of January 1840 and on the 19th sighted a part of the continent where
the first ever landing on continental Antarctica was made. The area was
described by d'Urville as " a formidable layer of ice... over a base of
rock" it was named Terra Adélie after d'Urville's wife. Seeing a new kind of
penguin, he named that too after his wife.

They determined the approximate position of
the southern magnetic pole before heading back to Tasmania and New Zealand
arriving back in Toulon France on November the 7th 1840.

At a cost of 22 crew dead and 27 deserted,
they had brought back more natural history specimens than had ever been
obtained in a single voyage before. Dumont d'Urville's account of
Astrolabe's
third voyage took up 23 volumes and 5 atlases.

The Ship of Jules
Dumont D'Urville Stuck in an Ice Floe in Antarctica
Giclee Print

The Corvette
"Astrolabe" Caught Among Icebergs in the Antarctic Giclee Print

The Corvette
"Astrolabe" Caught Among Icebergs in the Antarctic Giclee Print